


Take Me Down to the Infirmary

by aderyn



Series: Natural Facts [15]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Gen, Post Reichenbach, whisky & morphine & cautionary tales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 06:25:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I’m not a good man; if you walk with me, take even one step with me,one of us—or both—will end up here, at Barts, on a slab.” </p>
<p>“Shh,” Sherlock says, dreaming, “I’m going to tell you everything I never told you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Me Down to the Infirmary

**Author's Note:**

> A double 221B. Yet another thank-you to Chapbook, for plying me with more murder ballads, “goodnight" ballads, and the history of “The Saint James Infirmary Blues”.

_"I know the whiskey it won't soothe my soul  
and the morphine won't heal my heart  
but if you take me down to the infirmary  
I won't have to sleep or drink alone." –Cracker, “Take Me Down to the Infirmary”_

 

**Whisky**

John wakes up alone. The fever dream has receded. He knows this because he's soaked. He could have sworn there was ice. But that’s gone.  There's a glass on the nightstand he doesn't remember fetching. There’s what he thinks is a black feather on the floor, but it turns out to be a clump of dark thread.  He gets up and the room whirls when he bends down to look at it.

But the flat is dead quiet and he's alone.

He lies down again and dreams of a time when Sherlock was in hospital (just overnight, but it was worrying enough) and he sat by the bed and hooked back over one ear the oxygen line, as delicate as a jellyfish tentacle.  He dreams about what he did to the man who put Sherlock in the bed, something he hadn’t done since the desert.

Awake, John won’t admit to an affinity for violence.   _But all I want,_ he thinks _, is just the one thing_... for that, he’d do again what he’s already done; all the worst things, again.

He has a drink the next day with Harry (mistake) and whisky (contact drunk from John’s; she hasn’t got one) makes her direct.

"You loved him?" she asks.

“Salt in the wounds,” he says.  Hands out; don’t go there.

_More than breathing._

 

**Morphine**

He is the last thing John needs, the very last. He knows it but he can’t help himself.  Perhaps with his presumption he was trying to warn John off, to say, “I’m not a good man; if you walk with me, take even one step with me,one of us—or both—will end up here, at Barts, on a slab.” But it didn’t work; he knew it wouldn’t work; he saw in John’s hands behind his back that he would come, that it would begin.

“Oh,” he thinks, on the way to the mortuary, "not the effect I was going for."

But it was.

*******

“Shh,” Sherlock says, dreaming, “I’m going to tell you everything I never told you.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

_Your grave face, the one you put on when you’re holding someone’s wrist (mine), but also the one that says, literally, that you know the dead, that you wouldn’t run because I also know them, is the first thing I loved about you.  That was what I saw at Barts._

_When you said it was all fine I said good, but what I meant was probably, likely sometime soon, certainly forever, I will die for you, because that was, that was...(if these are the edges, then think what’s at the centre) as infinite as the grave, only much, much better._

 

_  
_

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "St. James Infirmary Blues":
> 
> Cab Calloway: [ "St. James Infirmary Blues"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENz9TVtGMWU)  
> Louis Armstrong: ["St. James Infirmary Blues"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzcpUdBw7gs)  
> The White Stripes: ["St. James Infirmary Blues"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okaTj5IXh5A%20t)
> 
> And also by Cracker's "Take Me Down to the Infirmary" and "St. Cajetan":
> 
>  ["Take Me Down to the Infirmary"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dly5hGdsczY)  
> [ "St. Cajetan"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBImfUGDHQ)


End file.
